You don't like the way somebody looks and you hire security to make his life "challenging".
Yeow!!! This is a libertarian forum?
You don't like the way somebody looks and you hire security to make his life "challenging".
Yeow!!! This is a libertarian forum?
So a lawsuit? Scott Wiener's ban? Pick your least fascist poison.
Marcy
Seriously? Are we comparing walking around naked in public to race segregation and genital mutilation?
But, If you feel that allowing an exhibitionist to walk around naked saves a child from genital mutilation than I support the cause.
I think this topic may have finally been reduced to its absurd conclusion.
Won't fly. I already took care of that comparison in an earlier post.
BTW, we seem to be speaking at cross purposes as to what "libertarian" means. To me it means keeping government as far away from my affairs as possible, and defending my turf in the least aggressive way possible. That is why, again, I do not support the government solution to the nudity issue, but encourage merchants and families who feel encroached upon to take private action in the least aggressive way. Merchants and neighborhoods hire private security to ensure that their property is not absconded with; in my view, that property should include revenue, which merchants claim is evaporating because the general public prefers not to shop in their neighborhood.
Marcy
David, truer words were never spoken!! : - )
Marcy
The various degrees of government-coerced compliance to social conventions are not comparable except that they are forced.
I would have a difficult time convincing a rational person I am damaged by the appearance of naked people and that I require protection. The less we engage this sort of voodoo and superstition the better.
John
I can live with that even if I think its voodoo. I don't like the homeless look either.
John
Leslie,
You say you believe in "limited govt." Yet you advocate the Govt dictating to the rest of us what people should wear? This hardly sounds like a limited Govt!
Generally, limited-Govt libertarians believe the powers of the state should be relegated to protecting individuals against initiatory force and fraud.
Your "limited govt" is growing rapidly.
Warm regards, Michael
challenge to proposed nudity ban in SF / protest at City Hall (Noon, Weds. 11/14)
And it grows until 50.1% are pushing around 49.9% of the people. Then the 49.9 % find some way to get an edge to become the 51.1%. This is done with more government power to give something to a larger number of people, at the expense of a smaller number of people.
There are very few naked-people while there are many who are offended by them. Giving government the power to enforce the dominant position will produce a lopsided polarization.
Back and forth it goes, winning and loosing by this process. But each time, the power of government always increases, ratcheting-away our freedom, one cog at at time; one law at a time; one election at a time.
The important question is NOT whether there will be naked-people but whether there WILL BE more government power. My answer to the question is NO, to more government power. At this stage in the game there is NO good reason for ANY MORE government power.
Marcy's position takes a step back from government power but forward to conditions that will produce even worse government powers. We can see this played out in grand theater from 1791 to 1860 over the issue of slavery. The result was mayhem and then the involuntary union of states, which essentially traded private ownership of slaves for public ownership of everyone in a compulsory socialist police-state.
Here it gets complex and the institutionalized bias, from a century of socialist indoctrination tells us that we have a "right" so a certain social expectation. We don't.
Unless we want to slurp the socialist kool-aide and live in the inevitable police-state, and so long as we are free to exercise our unalienable rights, the naked-person has the same negotiating position as anyone else. That by virtue of his minority, he is compelled to others' standards is an abomination.
This is not to mention the monster that is created in the performance of the abomination.
Having established equal status in negotiation, then by virtue of others' prejudice, ordinance, or convention, he is deemed harmful, those others have revealed the corruption of their own position. This is an important element in the invalid social contracts that produce most social unrest and injustice.
The enforcement of those invalid social contracts, become the work of chaos and the source of more misery, death, mayhem, disruption, torture, and more, than any other cause, short of pandemic infectious disease.
Do I want naked-people in the street? No! Especially if they are fat and ugly. That's why I wear clothes! 
(who knows what I might do otherwise)
So, in order to have liberty, I must take a position of informed indifference to people's fashions as it relates to public conduct.
Urinating and defecating are issues in an entirely different context. The failure to recognize this difference, from whether someone is naked, demonstrates a disturbing degree of confusion in the political discussion.
Here we are asking questions about infectious disease and material damages, not social expectations.
John
In theory, there are sorts of disgusting clothes that individuals might choose to wear on the street. But there are virtually no laws regulating what clothes must look like.
There could be people who wear t-shirts that display images of butchered fetuses. There could be people who wear entire costumes that show the most revolting scenes of battle carnage, or slaughterhouses (animal rights activists might wear such), or pictures of babies with hare lips (such pictures sometimes appear in newspaper ads, to get people's attention and ask them to contribute to correct such sad outcomes).
But no one would propose that the government ban such clothes, even though they might be more revolting than anyone's natural unclothed body. Surely we can't advocate bans on things that disgust us and that are on view in public.
Once upon a time it was illegal for men to dress in public in clothes traditionally worn by women. We laugh at such laws now, but even in my lifetime, there were such laws and they were enforced.
Richard Winger
415-922-9779
PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147
Les,
You seem to be suggesting that the nudists are trying to dictate that everyone else not wear clothes, but I don't think they have suggested any such thing. My understanding is they simply want the freedom to make that choice for themselves, just as people who want to wear clothes in public have the choice to do so.
A generation ago, people would have been saying the same kinds of things about a gay male couple holding hands in public that some people today are saying about the nudists -- "They can do what they want in private, but I don't want to see it, and I don't want my kids to see it. Why do they have to flaunt their __________ in public?"
Fortunately society has become more enlightened about that, and most people (at least in this part of the world) now realize that seeing a gay couple holding hands or kissing in public does not harm children or anyone else. Over a period of time, a large percentage of the population has gone from open hostility and bigotry, to grudging acceptance, to true understanding.
Sadly, it appears that many San Franciscans haven't yet grasped the general principle, and that a similar type evolution of thinking will have to occur with regard to public nudity before they stop agitating for government to violate the civil liberties of people who choose not to wear clothing over those parts of their body which sex-negative religions have traditionally mandated must be covered up.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
John,
Valid points, all.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Oh, btw, I did go to the hearing today. I may or may not have gotten some press -- I was right there when the sheriff's deputies were escorting several people who disrobed out of the room, and tried to get some words in when they were being interviewed and filmed outside the board chambers. Mostly along the lines of "These were all Democrats who voted for this -- Libertarians would never support this kind of fascist legislation" (which I certainly *hope* is true!) Also gave a few brief comments to a student reporter from the SFSU Xpress paper.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Starchild,
Yes, thanks.
It is a different aspect of the same thing, as the Taliban forcing women to wear burkas.
And then by the same device, force everyone to wear nothing or something else.
There are always a myriad of reasons ans excuses on the way to tyranny.
Overlooking the massive negative externalities of various prohibitions is a classic.
John
Starchild,
"Democrats want new prohibition of naked people in San Francisco, snuffing-out 150 years of liberty tradition.".
I like the angle. Maybe the Republicans hate the Democrats so much, we can get their support for limited government and civil liberties again.
So far, their program has been focused on how to get more jack-boots for less money. Under ordinary conditions they would jump on the chance to have more police, beating naked people. But with Democrats stealing their thunder, that could change.
John
Marcy,
Would you be okay with the reverse happening -- nudists or their supporters hiring private security to harass business owners who disagree with them? I think such actions by those on either side of the debate would cross the line into initiation of force, whether the perpetrators were the SFPD or independent security agents. Government is as government does.
I think that if opponents of nudity were to spend more time hanging out with nude people, they would gradually get used to it, and their hostility would evaporate. In fact that may be what some of the reactionary elements are afraid will happen. I get the sense from some of the comments, including by Scott Wiener at the hearing yesterday, that the prude lobby is willing to tolerate an occasional naked person in public as long as long as they feel they can dismiss such individuals as isolated nutcases and nudity doesn't become accepted as a social norm.
Again all of this should seem quite familiar to anyone aware of the history of previous civil rights struggles by gays, mixed-race couples, and others who fought for the freedom to be themselves in public without hurting others.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Starchild,
heh heh heh....(heavy red-neck drawl) "We don't like yer naked-hatin business round these 'parts'."
So, I am disgusted by the limp-wristed defense of liberty by the BOS. So is John Avalos. Maybe you can set up a meeting with him and those of us who agree, to devise an an approach to the other soops who are more indifferent to liberty.
AND wassup with the naked people? It's cold! Are there really people standing naked in the cold?
Why? To see if the ignorant fools will pass a law to stop them?
Or to cause the ignorant fools to pass a law to stop them, and watch them ensnare themselves in the web of statism?
Maybe there is an element of indifference to the sensibilities here, that we, as sincere, balanced activists can address with the appropriate parties. I can go to the theater and break-wind too, but why?
Just cuz some people are too stupid to save themselves from the jaws of tyranny, is not the reason to go to the theater and fart. That's a pretty twisted sense of humor. I would hope that somebody might bring that to my attention if I didn't know already.
Wouldn't you think twice about doing something, over which people will kill themselves?
But then it is somewhat of a hostage situation...(panicky quavering voice) "Put your clothes back on or...or...we will...enslave us all!!"
Let's see if the libs can step and put this to bed.
John
It's an interesting question. Everyone should have the right to behave however they like if they don't violate the rights of others. But what about the people who (uptight or not) see exposure to nudity as a violation of their rights? Parents have the right to raise their children according to their standards of behavior, and nudity is crossing the line for many of them. We have a rating system for movies/TV/internet to allow parents judge what they let their kids see (Thankfully it's not forced on us), but public behavior is a grey area. No one gets upset about smoking in public, or wearing a Berkeley sweatshirt in Palo Alto, but we shouldn't go mutilating ourselves at a public playground (that's graphic, sorry). We can't hold all public spaces to the standards of the most uptight person, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. I see the law as an acceptable solution for a tough problem. By allowing public nudity with certain restrictions, the government gives those who find it offensive the chance to avoid it.
Personally I have no problem with public nudity, in fact I find it funny as hell.